Group Responses (Week 4)

'Democracy means simply bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.'- Oscar Wilde

Shayne Flint situated the complexity and interest of engineering systems in the relationships between their components. This importance of relationships is analogous to many complex social systems ranging from corporations to entire polities. Such a similarity is not unsurprising given Bar-Yam's description of the importance of human-human and human-technological interactions to the design and operation of complex engineering systems. I would have liked to ask Shayne to compare his strategies for systems engineering to that of general management theory. At any rate, this week's political tool suggests that behavioural trends may be engineered within an engineering system, organisation or constituency.

I was excited to co-facilitate the engineering tutorial and test my SMART+ goal of promoting enjoyable, participative learning. I was pleased with how engaged the group were in our activities, but also with how our activities offered insights into systems and collective human behaviour. The spaghetti towers were surprisingly diverse and unorthodox. I was particularly impressed by the evolutionary engineering group's guide rope structure. This group used small-group brainstorming and constant testing and innovation to great effect. It reminds me of the grassroots internet organising which the Obama campaign used to such great effect. I was also very interested to note that Xuemei Bai referenced a practice of 'urban evolutionary engineering' in her sustainability experiements in Asian cities. After modelling the uses of evolutionary engineering in class finding real-world examples was quite exciting.

The crowd behaviour experiments which we performed in the engineering tutorial also shed light on the behaviour of many individuals as an organisational group or even a voting public. For example, the collective inertia described in Week 2 is relevant to the uptake of innovations in a human-technological system. Just as scenario planning encourages strategic thinking, Rogers proposed that radial weak ties may be necessary to help individuals break away from an organisational status quo. Further, the pentatonic scale activity demonstrates the importance of shared memory for complex group interactions. The activity works because the pentatonic scale is a very familiar part of our cultural narrative. It forms the basis of much children's music, as well as Asian music and many other styles. Even such a small group were unconsciously ready to spontaneously act as one to form a human piano because they had a shared expectation of what was to come. This may again reflect positively on the use of scenario planning to ready organisations for change.

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.